Macdonald serves as the narrator’s guide to the afterlife, similar to the way Virgil guided Dante in The Divine Comedy. The narrator witnesses a few encounters between ghosts and solid people before meeting his “own” solid person, a man named George Macdonald, named by Lewis after the 19th-century Scottish author of the same name. Soon, however, a large crowd of “real” people-solid people-comes to meet them. When the passengers disembark, they discover that they are all semi-transparent, like ghosts. Their destination is a grassy plain on the summit of a high cliff. Before it reaches its destination, the narrator has endured the sob stories of two fellow passengers and witnessed an all-out brawl on board. The book begins with the narrator boarding a bus in the mean streets of the netherworld and taking a trip that will determine his eternal destiny.Īfter the narrator boards the bus, it takes off into the sky. But in his 1946 book The Great Divorce, C.S. The phrase “bus ride from hell” no doubt conjures up bad memories of trips to and from school on the big yellow bus, or perhaps visions of a cross-country journey you would rather forget. S.By Clare Walker, Holy Trinity In-House Writer
Lewis attempts to refute Blake by explaining the clear difference between Heaven and Hell and by showing that Heaven is the true source of human enlightenment and happiness.Ĭheck out our Educational Resources for more by C. The Great Divorce is a response to William Blake’s famous work, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in which Blake says that good and evil are but two sides of the same coin and equally necessary to sustain life. This gives rise to the revolutionary idea that the gates of Hell are only locked from the inside and that those who want to leave for Heaven may do so at any time-if only their will is strong enough.
The rest of the novel involves conversations in which the spirits of Heaven try to convince the ghosts of Hell to join them in paradise.
The Great Divorce opens with an unnamed narrator in the “grey town.” He soon boards a bus for those who wish to leave and, upon departure, realizes he is a ghost in the afterlife on a “vacation” from Hell.
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